Titans

03.24.10

Brin Talks Google's War with China

Paul Sakuma / AP Photo

How does Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin feel about the company’s decision to pull out of China? Brin says China has increasingly grown to resemble the Soviet Union, from which he fled with his family to escape anti-Semitism when he was 6 years old. Despite China’s “great strides against poverty and whatnot,” Brin says “in some aspects of their policy, particularly with respect to censorship, with respect to surveillance of dissidents, I see the same earmarks of totalitarianism, and I find that personally quite troubling.” Google set up operations in China in 2005 and abided by the censorship for years. Brin says it got particularly bad right before the Beijing Olympics, and that cyberattacks on Chinese activisits’ emails in January were the “straw that broke the camel’s back.” "Ultimately I guess it is where your threshold of discomfort is," Brin says. "So we obviously as a company crossed that threshold of discomfort."